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From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Possible Fines for Virus Perpetrator
Message-ID: <5331@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 7 Nov 88 15:41:06 GMT
References: <456@l5comp.UUCP> <12081@dscatl.UUCP> <16600@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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Reply-To: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
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Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
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In article <16600@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) writes:
>In article <12081@dscatl.UUCP>, lindsay@dscatl (Lindsay Cleveland) writes:
>>>		  So, it was Robert T. Morris Jr., was it?
>
>>I would surmise that a lot of the sites who *were* damaged by the
>>virus and expended much real cash in man-hours (overtime!) chasing it
>>down would be interested in proceeding with a class-action suit against
>>the fellow to recover damages.
>
>Well gee.  Divide $10K say by 10K computers say, and they each win $1.
>Next you subtract off the lawyers' fees...  Hmmm...  Economics wasn't
>your major, I presume?

That was an unkind comment, Weemba.  It also misses the fact that such
a class action suit could be filed for millions, not $10K.  I suspect
that Sun Microsystems will expend a few $100K on this -- not only to
eradicate the worm in their internal network, but they will have the
expense of FedEx'ing copies of patches to all their sites under
maintenance.  DEC will have similar costs.  Then there is BBN and....

Get the idea?  This was not a small-time problem.  The losses could
amount to millions.  I would not be surprised if Cornell was named
as a part to such suits, and maybe even AT&T.  Lawyers like
to name everybody that has deep pockets and might be partially at
fault.  Morris may not be able to pay a judgment that large,
but he may not be the only one sued.

>Yup, good show there.  I hope you're not smugly counting on the next rogue
>code to be so easy to notice and eliminate by some of my fellow Berkeley
>grad students?  DO SOMETHING **NOW** TO PROTECT YOURSELVES!  WAKE UP FOLKS!

It is nice to take pride in your fellow Berkeley-oids, but you are
insulting the professional staff and students at other locations where
the worm was cracked.  The folks at MIT did a lot of work with the
folks at Berkeley, for instance.  Here at Purdue we had a fix in place
before the ones were published from Berkeley.  So it goes at many other
locations.

-- 
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	uucp:	...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf